Intellectual seekers in the notorious Tenderloin, San Francisco
by John-Ivan Palmer
[ places - february 07 ]
John-Ivan PalmerLate one night in the Tenderloin, 1968, my girlfriend (if you could call her that) was talking to one of her topless-bottomless dancing friends at an unlicensed bottle club deceptively called Coffee Ron. I ignored the riffraff staring at me for reading a book. Suddenly three men pulled a gun on the manager, and beat up the bartender who tried to intervene. Panic, screaming. My two lady escorts rushed behind me for protection. I held the Encyclopedia of Stage Hypnotism (1947) over my chest in an equally absurd attempt to protect myself from bullets.
It was horrible what happened next. The manager, a naive ex-prize fighter named Gene Echols, was beaten almost to death. [1] In the hospital for weeks. Of course no one called the police, and when they asked questions afterward, no one talked. This was a typical night in the Tenderloin shortly after the Summer of Love.
Around the time I was living in that black hole, a San Francisco journalist wrote, "The Tenderloin seems overwhelming and eternal and no one can really say for sure what is happening within its sprawling reaches." [2] As close as most people got was reading about it in the paper - salacious stories of sordid sex, thug wars, and murder. Having lived there, I can tell you it was indeed a horrific place. But the cost of living was cheap.
Some people, however, liked the thrill. There's nothing like a little danger to enhance your whoring. If you were brave enough to enter those sprawling reaches of several dozen square blocks, the open depravity was something to behold. In an atmosphere where violence was taken for granted, people acted out their paraphilias on bar stools at noon, and boiled methamphetamine hydrochloride over snifter candles in front of nude dancers at midnight. Or maybe it was the reverse. It didn't matter. Police acted mostly as undertakers, picking up the bodies, both dead and alive, or, like Echols, in some state of suspension in between. In spite of all this, it was still a lure to a certain kind of tourist. A businessman attending a dental supply convention at the nearby Hilton could venture a few blocks over to the Why Not at 393 Eddy Street for a 60-second sex act with someone who looked exactly like a woman. Adrenalin on the house.
Few would have seen this nihilistic gulch as an intellectual environment, but I discovered otherwise, and it might say something about all environments that appear hostile to higher inquiry, from a juche prison to a Basiji checkpoint. Among the predators and the prey, carefully hiding among the junkies and the slashers, was a thin scattering of stoned entomologists, hopped up Latinists, whorehouse biblical scholars, and obsessed littérateurs. Unlike the happy hedonists of the Haight, these were haunted ascetics who traded physical comfort and safety for the ever more lavish luxury of time itself.
It's not that I chose to live in the Tenderloin per se, it's that I was involved with a macromastic woman who worked in clubs there under the name of Felicia Fantasy. I shared a room with her at the Empress Hotel. The sexual part of my involvement was unconventional to say the least. By that I mean, there was none. And she was paying me. However twisted it may sound, the contract was this: I would escort her around as general protection, and in exchange I got lodging and a few dollars plus the status of being seen in her presence. Since I was a poseur and a phony, this kind of ego enhancement suited me just fine.
Beyond that, I viewed my tenure in the Tenderloin as basic education. I learned, for example, that for all the open sex - gay, straight, kinky or otherwise - it was actually a sexual desert. Very little of it happened that was not commercial. Felicia popped ping-pong balls from between her legs into audiences of hooting men, and posed for magazines with titles like Tit Parade and Butt Farm, even though I never heard her express a single sexual urge. Not until the end, at least. And it wasn't for me. Then there was the unwritten ethos of violence - if it happened, it was an accepted consequence of being there. So you went to great lengths to deter it, first by bluff, then by fight or flight. The bluff and flight part was my style. I grew exquisitely alert to the element of surprise, like when a man called out to me once in desperation, "hey, my teeth are on the sidewalk!" A plate of dentures sat right there in the open. "I'm sick, can you pick them up for me before someone steps on them?" I was no dummy. As soon as I bent over, he'd kick me in the Adam's apple and steal my shoes. I walked by 10 minutes later and the man and his teeth were gone. But I still had my shoes.
The young man who rented the room next to ours was a priest of time from Omaha. I'll pixilate his name to Lars Chalker. He had a vulnerable-looking, boyish face and a soft voice. He knew that the best time to venture out in relative safety was late morning or early afternoon. Yet he was still besieged by hookers and curb-crawling johns. He left his book-filled room vacant for months while he shipped out as a merchant seaman on "jungle runs," long excursions to the Indies. Not unlike other merchant mariners, including Melville, he sequestered himself belowdecks and read voraciously. When he returned to San Francisco he occupied that room in the Empress Hotel day and night for as long as possible, lived frugally off his savings and whatever marijuana he smuggled in, and read his way down long lists of the least known works of authors like Emerson, Hawthorne, James, McCullers, Dickenson. He claimed that this was where he found their hidden soul, as in Edith Wharton's 'The Letter', an ignored story about a secret within a secret within a secret, which can never be told.
Literature was his addiction. He was always willing to talk with anyone at Coffee Ron, the Mocambo, the Latin Quarter, or some other dive, and insinuate literary themes into the dialogue. Like the Peripatetics, he thrived on relevance. When a woman pushed her boyfriend down the stairs of the Empress, breaking his leg and then later stabbing him with an ice pick right through the cast, the boyfriend moved to a room at the end of the hall and spied on her from a distance. Lars carefully observed all this and compared it to the story by Hawthorne, where a man left his wife without a word and then spied on her for years out of "morbid vanity." Gesturing to the boyfriend's room, Lars said, "That's American literature. A view of the world from a place of isolation."
Since I was new to the neighborhood I did not know Vincent DeVries, who lived on the same floor but at the end of a dark hall. I'm tempted to use his real name because I think he should be more fully recognized, but I'm not sure what he's doing now and whether he would like certain details of his Tenderloin phase made public. On the other hand he could be long dead. So I will compromise and use only his real first name.
One night Felicia sent me down the hall to borrow a corkscrew from him. To get to his room I walked through zones of ghastly groaning and voices growling in alcoholic perseveration. As I knocked on his battered door I saw something written toward the bottom just an inch or two above the floor. I had to lean way over to read it – 'Pedicatur qui leget'. The door opened and when my eyes looked up I saw a man in his mid-20s who looked like Marcel Proust. A crazed Marcel Proust. He wore glasses, was alert as a monkey in a shock experiment, and had the characteristic emaciation of someone habituated to stimulants.
When I entered his room I had to carefully step around tall stacks of books. The only furniture was an armchair, the epicenter of everything, where he apparently read as well as slept. I glanced at the book titles and quickly saw that most of them pertained to authors of ancient Greece and Rome. A lot of Seneca, Ovid, Apuleius and all sorts of Petronian studies. Many were library books, and he was evidently one of those people not afraid to check them out dozens at a time. One nice thing about the Tenderloin - it was a short walk to the public library.
DeVries did have a corkscrew, but according to him it was not for opening wine bottles. He said he carried it as self-defense in the Ajax Club next door, where he stocked up on dexedrine phosphate, of which he tried to sell me a hundred tabs at a "very reasonable price." He offered me one as a sample, and when I declined he popped it himself.
"Just don't fucking owe me money," he continued, explaining how, if he jabbed the corkscrew with a twist into someone's eye socket, he could pop out the entire eyeball like a cork. It didn't seem possible, but I was not about to question his veracity.
In a quick, speed-freak's mood shift, DeVries told me he'd had it with people not taking him seriously, like the waiter at a lunch counter who didn't believe there was salt in his milk and refused to taste it to see for himself. That's why the waiter got the salty milk in his surly face - so he could taste it. He told me how ridiculous it was for someone at the Ajax to call him a "fag and a pansy," when the Tenderloin was full of "fags and pansies" and so what the hell was the point?
He gripped the corkscrew as if ready to lunge, as if I might be "one of those assholes who never heard of Petronius." In trying to step back I nearly knocked over a stack of Suetonius. He told me about his feud with the University of California library over restrictive borrowing privileges for non-students like himself, as well as their "anemic" classics department where no one considered, even for a moment, that the author of Satyricon might not be the Petronius famously mentioned by Tacitus in Annales, but another Petronius who lived a hundred years later in the realm of the emperor Commodus. Or even more intriguingly, that the author of Satyricon might be the son of Petronius Umbrinus, who served as curator under Tiberius. DeVries had a weakness for crackpot theories, but even more so he had a weakness for creating enemies so he could fight them. Over the weeks I realized that like Lars, he'd bring up his literary studies in conversation all the time, but the speed freaks he hung around with ignored pretty much everything he said unless it was amphetamine related.
He asked me if I knew Latin and I said "some." Then he asked if I knew the Latin word for "prick," but I had to tell him I missed school that day.
"Prick should be translated as mentula. Catullus couldn't use it enough in his elegies, and Caesar Augustus used it once in attacking Marc Antony. If you're talking about a big, raw cock sticking straight up and ready to rape your face, you'd use verpa - a feminine noun, you'll notice - about the lowest fucking thing you could say. It wasn't beneath Catullus to use it, however."
He asked me quite abruptly if I ever went to the Turkish Club Baths, a nearby den of fast and loose gay sex. I said no, I had not. Then he launched into an extended piece of sophistry on Martial's use of the noun pedico (butt fucker), and asked me if I saw the phrase 'Pedicatur qui leget' on the bottom of his door.
"If you lived in ancient Pompeii, you'd see it all the time as graffiti. Sometimes they wrote it low to the ground, so that if anyone bent over to read it they would see that it said - it's a lot tighter in Latin - "If you can read this, you're getting it up the ass."
He was obviously high on dex and on the verge of flying out of control with a corkscrew in his hand. Lacking the social skills of a graceful exit, I simply pulled myself away, hobbled over his piles of Ovid and Plautus, and scurried back down the eerie hallway to the relative safety of Felicia's room. When she saw that I had returned empty handed, she heaved up her huge bosom and let out a sigh. Then she went back to get the corkscrew herself, opened the wine, and drank it in a mood of seething annoyance.
That was the night I learned that the Romans, like Vincent DeVries himself, had a knack for invective, but no sense of tragedy.
It was common in the Haight - but not the Tenderloin - for people to ask, "what are you into?" It was a social convention, an accepted protocol, like asking someone's name. It assumed first of all that everyone was into something - Krishnamurti, astrology, acid, the Stones. In the Tenderloin you were more likely to be asked, "What do you need?" And this was inevitably followed by "how much are you willing to pay?" Maybe that's the difference between a world next to Golden Gate Park and a world next to the Financial District.
I met Morris Childs out of need. He had something I needed for an experiment in mesmerism I'd read about in Ormond McGill's Encyclopedia of Stage Hypnotism. I met Childs at the Mocambo. His girlfriend was known as 'Flying Venus' because of her eccentric nude dancing technique. It was hard not to notice him in his white shirt, cufflinks and tie - unusual dress for the streets of Sodom - but even more noticeable was an inexplicable smell that radiated off his body. It was the smell of mothballs and ether. But even that didn't make him as conspicuous as when he sat in the Mocambo among the slummers and B-girls - with a butterfly net.
The hookers and toughs seemed to find Childs amusing and conferred upon him the street name 'Pigeon Man' because they thought the net was for catching birds. On weekends he'd meet Venus sometime after midnight, and together they got a ride from a good-natured old black man, a whorehouse janitor, who claimed total abstinence from everything. There was always a dog-eared bible open on the dashboard of his car and he supposedly memorized the entire Book of Revelation. He dropped them off at the home of her rich parents in Burlingame, where Childs hunted butterflies on various large properties, including the Hearst estate (of Patty Hearst fame) and one owned by the Kennedy family. He brought a box of mounted butterflies into the Mocambo one night to show around, and everyone was impressed to see them mounted on pins with their wings spread and lined up in neat rows. But they were at a loss as to why he did it.
Life in those times was supremely simple. One reason why Lars, DeVries and Childs had all the time they wanted was because there was nothing to distract them. No TVs, no telephones, no credit cards, or hardly even a watch or a clock. You could literally live off selling your own plasma twice a week. There were no schedules, only horizons of need. To find someone, instead of dialing them up you went out into the street and found them by telepathy. It worked amazingly well.
To find Morris Childs for what I needed, I stood outside the Empress Hotel on Eddy Street and divided the Tenderloin in half. Then I intuited which half he was more likely to be found. I kept dividing the Tenderloin into smaller halves until I came to a hotel, the name of which is now illegible from some drink spilled on that page in my diary. I went inside and, like an animal, I sniffed out the scent of mothballs and followed it to his room.
When he opened the door I was hit by a gas attack of naphthalene, carbolic acid and ether. Also a smoke cloud of hashish. My eyes watered and my throat constricted. I didn't know how he could stand to live in such a toxic tomb. The ether was to kill his specimens, the carbolic acid was to keep the dead bodies relaxed, and the moth balls were to protect them from other bugs. My first thought was to open a window to let out the stink, but the only window in his room was sealed with black construction paper to block the outside world.
Where DeVries had mountains of books, Childs had mountains of cigar boxes. And in each box was a mothball mounted on a pin to protect his specimens from scavengers. On a small rickety table was an expensive binocular microscope with "Property of the Univ. of Calif." imprinted on the base. I couldn't understand what Venus saw in this walking chemical factory, and why she supported his collecting trips all over the Bay Area, but she seemed to like men who were sexually harmless.
She met him one night at Bernstain's Fish Grotto, one of the few legitimate businesses still surviving in the Tenderloin, and took him back to her room at a residence club (hotel for single young people). He went into the bathroom and took off all his clothes, then sat on the edge of the bathtub, talking to himself. Still naked, he asked if he could use the phone, but he dialed only three numbers and waited a long time for someone to answer. Seems he was high on mushrooms. She gently helped him back into his clothes and then outside to catch a bus back to the Tenderloin. They'd been together ever since. To her Childs was some kind of protection. A human mothball.
He was willing to give me the small bottle of ether I needed for my experiment. I walked out of his hotel smelling like him. With the ether in my pocket, I bought a bouquet of daffodils and went directly to see Edward Johnson, the old gay actor who hung around the lobby of the Camelot Hotel on Turk Street. When I found him, he was conducting a lively lecture on how the choreographer Fokine directed Nijinsky to look like he was escaping the body of a puppet in Petrouchka. His audience was a few decrepit geezers spending their final years staring into space, waiting to die. I had something in mind that would startle them back to life.
Edward Johnson was a busybody and a magpie who knew all about everyone on his block of Turk Street. Like the stereotypical snoop peeking from behind the curtains, he kept a close eye on the comings and goings from the Club Turkish Baths next door, but he also snaked his social tentacles up into the apartment buildings, where people lived in a higher canopy above the sordidness of the street.
Lars and I occasionally visited Johnson in his room (he was always thrilled when any young man came to see him), and, like other Tenderloin inhabitants, owed much of his room's contents to the San Francisco Public Library. It was cluttered with books by the shopping bagful on theater and costume, stagecraft and ballet, as well as phonograph records of operas played on a cheap turntable, and even framed prints, checked out like books and hung on his wall. Occasionally one or two other geriatric gay thespians joined us. They were impoverished like Johnson, defenseless prey scuttling under the leaves of the jungle floor. Every so often they got robbed or beat up, and I'd see them with a bandaged head or black eye, zonked out on painkillers, carrying on as animated as ever about their Bellini's, Velluti's, and Rossini's. Whatever stage careers they had were largely over, so they thrived on manufactured conflicts among themselves as an excuse to perform histrionic speeches and dramatic exits.
During one of his own monodramas, Johnson confided to Lars and me that he'd been in love only twice in his life, "once with a woman and once with a man." The woman part didn't seem too convincing and he never said much about her except that she was an actress, but the man was "a splendidly handsome Shoshone." He went into a well-rehearsed recital of how his Indian lover died in his arms one night in a Russian Hill mansion. Johnson swooned over the man's voice, his ebony hair, his soulful eyes and claimed he descended from someone who sold Merriweather Lewis a horse. Then he slid out a dusty pile of curled black and white photos from under his bed. Lots of shirtless native youths, some in tribal dress, some laughing or smiling, and a few - the ones that stood out most arrestingly - flirted playfully in effeminate poses. "This is his life's work. He was a photographer."
I told Johnson the images were unique and should not be deteriorating under a damp skid row bed. I said he should donate the stuff to the Historical Society.
"No!" he exclaimed, clutching them to his chest like Desdemona's handkerchief, a little puff of dust rising up. "I will never part with these."
In the Encyclopedia of Stage Hypnotism, Ormond McGill describes a method where you make mesmeric passes over a vase of flowers, causing them to droop over "hypnotized." According to McGill, people will be impressed. In those days I had a burning need to be impressive. Living in the Tenderloin, it was easy to fantasize pointing my fingers like Svengali to stop knife-wielding assailants in mid-lunge. Imagine the respect, the status. After working my intended mojo on Edward Johnson, as well as others in his little coterie, I might be so emboldened as to take it into the Mocambo, where they always seemed to be starved for jaded stimuli.
McGill says that in order to hypnotize a vase of flowers, you need a small bottle with a two-hole stopper. The bottle goes in your right pants pocket. Into one hole you insert a flexible tube that runs up your right sleeve and ends at the cuff. Into the other hole you insert another flexible tube that runs over to your left pants pocket and ends with a squeeze bulb. The bottle is filled with ether. When you squeeze the bulb in your left pocket, it forces ether vapor out the bottle in your right pocket, up through the tube, down your sleeve, and out your cuff to hit the flowers. For some unexplained botanical reason they will droop. You point to them and say they are "hypnotized." People will gasp and look at you in awe.
When I showed up carrying a bouquet of daffodils, Johnson gasped and fluttered his eyelashes. "You brought them for me?"
"In a sense." I fingered the ear syringe in my pocket. "I'm going to hypnotize these flowers for you."
Once inside the lobby of the Camelot, I began to smell the ether coming from my pocket and heard a couple of people say, "what's that smell?" So I knew I had to start right away. Even Johnson sniffed me and said, "Have you been hanging around Childs?" He said it leeringly, as if we might be engaged in some sexual pas de deux.
I put the flowers in an old highball glass and set them on a wobbly chair. In front of a dozen people I made mesmeric passes over them with one hand - the one with the ether tube in my sleeve - and pumped the ear syringe in my pocket with the other. As the ether came out, a few petals here and there seemed to curl around the edges, but otherwise nothing happened. Johnson, naturally, had taken a keen interest in the hand in my pocket, pumping away furiously. The only other reaction I got was someone blurting out, "is that smell coming from you?"
I felt something like a burning redness envelop my face, either from embarrassment, the ether, or both. Sensing the drama needed some amendment, Johnson insisted that he be the subject of hypnotic influence rather than the flowers. Ormond McGill actually had a section in his Encyclopedia on "hypnotizing" people with ether, but I wasn't expecting to try it so soon.
Johnson sat on the chair, holding the flowers as if he were some old bearded bride, and I made mesmeric passes around his head, pumping ether in his face. Suddenly the flowers fell to the floor and he collapsed to one side, his arms flailing, grabbing me for support. With one hand he groped around the area of my pocket, seeking for what I was pumping in my pants, and when he came to the bulging ear syringe, he was so taken aback that he opened his eyes for a look, then quickly shut them again. Some of the Camelot's wheezing codgers stood for a better look. They were no longer dead people sitting up.
The lobby was not that large, and it was quickly beginning to smell like an operating room. By now everyone knew the odor of chloroform was coming from me and probably had something to do with the fumbling in my pocket, but they still didn't know what I was trying to prove. In a sense I didn't either. I just knew the spectacle had to end as soon as possible.
I told Johnson to "wake up," that he was now released from the hypnotic influence, but he kept hanging onto me with a smile of satisfaction, milking the scene beyond what it was worth. Things obviously hadn't worked as McGill said they would. That was irksome enough, but I was even more irritated at Johnson for deceiving and upstaging me with his fake trance. He was good at staying in character, while I was not - probably because he had one and I didn't.
Neither did I have the luxury of complete sentences when I wrote all this in my diary that night, so the aforementioned events were quickly jotted down as "flower trick, couldn't contain ether, failed to achieve effect." It was not until afterward that I found out that ether is the Houdini of chemicals, readily escaping its container no matter how tightly sealed, forming invisible, heavier-than-air streams that flow out in all directions, seeking their way down to the lowest level.
The same could be said of the intellectual seekers who lived in the Tenderloin. Nothing could contain them either, no social structure, no family pressure, no academic department, no jail. They sought their own level, flowing downward to the cheapest living conditions in order to make their Faustian bargain. Childs, DeVries, Lars, and others were the scholars, while the women, the gay hustlers, the transvestites, were the artists - artists of the body, short half-life notwithstanding. Their flames burned hotter, their clocks ran faster. If you had an obsession in the Tenderloin, it didn't take much to buy the time to indulge it, minute by unmeasured minute, month by unmeasured month. All you had to do was constantly watch your backside while trying not to step in the blood on the sidewalk.
Whatever flows ether-like into the Tenderloin's "sprawling reaches" eventually evaporates completely, leaving behind only the shells of walled enclosures, with no trace of the secrets they once contained. The first to vanish was Vincent DeVries. Felicia introduced him to a strip show barker named Mario, whose job it was to stand out on the sidewalk and rope in suckers "for a peek." Once they got a gander at Felicia popping ping-pong balls from between her legs into the audience, they paid the exorbitant two drink minimum without a second thought, only to enter a fly-swarm of hookers and B-girls. Mario once drove the getaway car for the robbery of a dry cleaners in the East Bay and went to prison for a a few years, where he taught himself Latin as a way to pass the time. He corresponded with Latin-writing pen pals, mostly young men in high school and college Latin clubs.
After they hung around for a while DeVries started telling everyone (as if they cared), "He doesn't know an ablative from an accusative. He's memorized a lot of words, but grammatically he's all shit."
One night I was walking down Eddy Street toward Market and I heard someone go "pssst" behind me. It was Mario, whom I almost didn't recognize because he was wearing lipstick and eye make-up and holding the arm of another man. That man was Vincent DeVries. I heard that several weeks later in Jimbos, Mario got into a fight with DeVries over who knows what, maybe Petronius's use of the present participle. Mario pulled a knife, DeVries pulled a corkscrew. Soon afterward they both disappeared - together.
The next to go was Lars, who sublimated himself to the Philippines, where it was rumored he saved enough money to retire in some tropical shack full of books and a child wife, and was last heard immersing himself in the Transcendentalists.
Disappearance is physical subtraction by whatever means, including death. I wasn't there to see it, but Ed Johnson probably left the Camelot on a stretcher, no doubt mumbling the final words of Othello. To him all the world was a stage, and his was a world of grisly sidewalks, broken glass, and police sirens. I was not aware that all the time I knew him he was, like Freud, slowly dying of jaw cancer, which might have accounted for his strange lisp. I don't know what became of the Shoshone photos. Maybe they were interred with his bones. I'm sure that someone I never met took over his role.
Evaporation had everything to do with Morris Childs. I was on my way to deliver a notebook that he left in Venus's purse on his last trip to Burlingame. It was not that unusual to see burned mattresses on the sidewalk, tossed from the window of an alcoholic who passed out with a lit cigarette, but there was something ominous about this particular one in front of Childs' hotel. It smelled of char, but it also smelled of mothballs. The mattress was his. He had apparently been melting glass tubing with a small blow torch, pulling it out like taffy into thin strands for dissecting butterfly organs, when ether fumes in his sealed room ignited. Cigar boxes lined with balsa wood and filled with nymphalids, pierids, lycaenids and hundreds of difficult to identify specimens in the family Hesperiidae flared up instantly. The only thing Childs left behind in the world was the notebook in Venus's purse. According to his final notations, he had three species in the genus Colias yet to be mounted, as well as a Polygonia satyrus, Pieris venosa, and a Coenonympha californica. They all became the final fuel of his burning passion.
It's easy to see the fire as simply the butterfly's revenge. I find more significance, however, in the last entry in his notebook, which I copied into mine before giving it back to Venus (who said, "what am I supposed to do with it?"). He wrote how he failed to catch a Lycaeides on the Crocker estate in Burlingame, which "recently had heavy gates put up and dozens of No Trespassing signs, making further collecting impossible." That may have kept him out, but not the butterflies. He finally captured one, not on fenced property in Burlingame, but on a potted Ceonathus bush on Hyde Street, right in the heart of the Tenderloin. [3] It was eventually devoured by flames, leaving its echo reverberating from the meanest of streets into his notes, and these words.
Felicia evaporated too, leaving me for another woman - which I saw coming for a long time - and thankfully I was thus relieved of solving the puzzle of whatever it was we had between us.
As a scene, the Haight-Ashbury, a dozen or so blocks further west, lasted only a few short years before its spirit snaked around the world like a plume of chloroform. The Tenderloin on the other hand has remained sealed up and contained for more than a century. What haunts me is not so much the ghosts of those subterranean creatures I met during my stay there, but the ghosts of those I never knew, like the woman who lived in the Tenderloin because it was the only place she could play the flute without having neighbors complain because there her neighbors were usually passed out. Or the young man I sometimes saw hanging around the Mocambo in mid-day, writing things down, like me, in a notebook. Or simply those with intelligent and querulous faces instead of the hard-bitten, whacked out stares of everyone else. One day I saw an old black man with a distinguished grey mustache walk slowly down the sidewalk. He stopped, raised his cane slowly, very slowly, and poked another black man sitting on a step, wearing a bowler hat, his head on his knees. A second poke was necessary to cause him to raise his head. He looked up with large, bloodshot eyes. His lips moved, but no words came out. It was the New Testament whorehouse janitor, somehow blown out of his own range. Were there ten, twenty, a hundred more Ahabs and Salomés nested away in railroad flats, languishing in abundant time and squalor, consumed by private gods?
Although the Tenderloin's orgy of obsession and despair continues, it's no longer cheap. Like pods of giant whales, profiteers have gulped down not only all the space, but all the time. If you're not living off a generous inheritance and you want to play the flute all day or merge with Emerson's karma, you'll have to find another place to do it. Perhaps elsewhere there are untouched places, steamy, windswept, desolate, dangerous, where time still thrives (but little else), and where the soul of civilization may be hiding.
Notes
1 This was evidently in retaliation for an earlier incident where Echols and two others beat up the Mocambo's manager, Ron ("Jersey") London, who had mafia connections. London was taken to the hospital with five jaw fractures, a broken nose, and the near loss of one eye. Instead of going to the police he simply said, "I'll take care of it myself." See San Francisco Chronicle, Nov 24 & 25, 1968. [Back]
2 California Living Magazine, San Francisco Examiner, May 12, 1974, p5. [Back]
3 According to his rough field notes, he also thought it could be an Echo Blue (Celastrina argiolus echo), in the same family, but if it was actually a Lycaeides somehow out of its range, then it was from a strange genus studied by Nabokov and alluded to in Lolita (see Joann Karges's Nabokov's Lepidoptera: Genres and Genera, p. 46). A still as yet unnamed hybrid species in this genus lives only in the harshest zones above the Sierra timberline, and, in a Tenderloin of its own, won't have sex with any other but its own rare kind. See 'Homoploid Hybrid Speciation in an Extreme Habitat', Science, vol. 314, no. 5807, Dec 22, 2006, pp1923-1925. [Back]
